Flights tests

Relief collages made from waste sheets recovered during the printing of IGN maps

The series Flight Tests was made from waste sheets recovered during the printing of IGN maps. These technical sheets, normally destined to be discarded, each isolate a single layer of the cartographic image: road networks, waterways, vegetation, relief or topographic symbols appear separately, reduced to a single colour.

Once stripped of their role within a comprehensive representation, these maps become fragmentary, abstract structures. The territories they describe seem to dissolve into flows, networks, movements and systems of signs. Roads, ridgelines, expanses of forest and watercourses compose mental geographies in which the eye moves continually between actual landscape and diagram.

Layers of cardboard have been added to these surfaces, creating areas of relief that evoke camouflage structures, buried architecture, bunkers, bases or concealed installations scattered across the landscape. Territory emerges as a space shaped by strategies of concealment, surveillance and movement.

The titles of the different series—Camps, Stations, Bases, Relays—reinforce this ambiguity between civilian cartography and the military imagination. Pursuing questions raised by Paul Virilio’s reflections on territory and the apparatus of warfare, Flight Tests also bears the imprint of the aerial and satellite images widely circulated during the Gulf War in the early 1990s. These new representations of conflict were profoundly changing our relationship with landscape: seen from above, territory became a surface for observation, targeting and control.

Yet rather than advancing an explicit argument, the series gives form to a sense of quiet unease. The maps appear at once precise and illegible, objective and ghostly. Their reliefs introduce blind spots, absences and hidden territories that unsettle any encompassing view.

As is often the case in my work, the concern is less with representing the world than with questioning the forms through which it becomes visible. Flight Tests thus explores an unstable geography between abstraction, technological memory and mental landscape, where systems of movement and control come to generate fictions of their own.